Brilliant But Organizationally Flawed
I decided to read Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory, in order to better understand what set the stage for a twentieth century replete with totalitarianism, genocide, and economic upheaval leading up to a twenty-first century beginning with an American regime tilting ominously towards some of the worst features of the prior century’s fascistic tendencies.
Blanning attempts to cover European history from the treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which concluded the Thirty Year’s War to 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in roughly 677 pages. Given the plethora of detailed material this task could easily have taken 4 volumes of that number of pages as in fact the Durants did in their Story of Civilization series.
There seems to be no question as to Blanning’s mastery of the material of this period, and I found his writing style more entertaining and readable than that of the Durants’. But I ultimately found the book disappointing for a number of reasons.
First, I believe this work is organizationally flawed. Once Blanning chose to forego employing a linear approach, he clearly needed to contrive a thematic structure within which the massive amount of information about this period could be organized and conveyed in order to optimize the reader’s ability to absorb it. Blanning certainly had many options from which to choose. For example, he might have centered the narrative around the various interrelationships among the historical personalities, including how they came into and out of power, how they attempted to influence each other etc.
The subtitle of the book, “The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe 1648 – 1815,” would have, in my view, provided just such an excellent strategy, and in fact I bought this book, and, I expect, others have on the mistaken assumption that this subtitle was descriptive of what the book intended to focus on. Blanning apparently had no such intention in mind. Except for the back cover of the book, where, I assume, it is the marketing editor’s blurb that informs us that the five revolutions referred to in the subtitle are: “scientific, industrial, American, French, and romantic,” nowhere else in the book is there mention of them as a group, or as the defining events of the period, let alone as organizing principles, and without that blurb, I would be hard pressed to name which five revolutions Blanning himself might have been referring to.
Instead, Blanning structures his book around the wholly arbitrary themes: “Life and Death,” which contains material about the development of communications, including transportation, medicine etc, “Power,” including discussion of rulers, reform, and revolution, “Religion and Culture,” including material on gardens and palaces, and a discussion on the dialectic between what he calls “the Culture of Feeling,” and the “Culture of Reason,” and finally, Part Four: “War and Peace,” which is the most linearly written and most compelling narrative. Perhaps he should have used Part Four as the template and filled in the rest of the material in and around that structure.
Except for Part Four, this structure has the effect of providing a conglomeration of facts, events, and characters interspersed in and among the various themes without a coherent context holding them together so that one gets the sense of slogging through details and from time to time asking oneself, who is this person, or that monarch, and who is related to whom, and again, why? I had the sense that it needed one more rewrite to get to the level of coherence I was missing.
This is not to say that there aren’t insightful arguments presented or conclusions drawn. There are many. For example, there is a fascinating discussion on pages 596 – 9, which describes the effects of how the British resolution of their “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which confirmed that “public finance would be subject to parliamentary control,” contrasted with Louis XIV’s absolute control over public finance in France. This gave the British a huge advantage in their ability to fund their war efforts since, one, the system they devised for revenue income through collection of excise and customs made these taxes invisible and therefore easier to collect, and two, with the formation of the Bank of England, the British government had the ability to finance its national debt much more efficiently and effectively than the French monarchy did. In contrast to the situation in Louis’s seventeenth century France, where tax farmers collected the government’s income, and the monarch himself had to borrow funds on his own credit, in the UK “the money was lent not to the monarch but to the nation, with the nation’s entire landed wealth, represented by Parliament, as the collateral.” p. 596 It is easy to see, given these differences why Great Britain was able to remain economically independent, and how it became a dominant world power at least until 1914.
For the sake of space I will offer only one more complaint: which is: the lack of sufficient material about Turkey. One gathers from repeated references to Turkey that it was an incredibly influential power during this period. Yet, there is precious little here about its internal political development, the history of its ruling elites, or economic situation, let alone the undoubtedly huge influence of Islam on its historical agenda. We only get to know Turkey as the shadow that is casts on Russia, The Holy Roman Empire, The Balkans, Hungary etc., never in its own right. In my view, there is no accounting for this omission.
While I have to say I did profit from the pile of facts, views, and insights that comprise The Pursuit of Glory, I think Blanning would have done us all a bigger favor, if he had given it one more draft worth of work, in which to write the book that his subtitle so compellingly implied it was, an elucidation of what he considers the five (or more) revolutions were during this period, how they inter-related with each other, and how they contributed to what the modern world turned out to be.
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